The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to directional channel reservation for time-division multiplexing downlink and uplink data burst transmission.
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, (e.g., a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system). A wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple communication devices, which may be otherwise known as user equipment (UE).
Some wireless systems may operate in unlicensed radio frequency (RF) spectrum. Devices operating in unlicensed RF spectrum may perform contention procedures to determine access to the wireless medium. In some cases, however, contention procedures may be based on omni-directional transmission. Devices communicating using directional transmissions (e.g., devices operating in millimeter wave (mmW) spectrum) may experience suboptimal performance when using contention procedures based on omni-directional transmission.